


do, do, do your dirty words, come out to play when you are heard

by r1ker



Category: Midnight Special (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6651217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker





	do, do, do your dirty words, come out to play when you are heard

While they're in the same hotel room together, Lucas figures he might as well make the best of it. In the cover of the heaviest black of night he slips out to a sleepy liquor store, grabs up what he knows gets him a little too honest and a little too slouchy in his seat, and hurries it back to the hotel.

 

He gets back and Sarah looks at the crumpled paper bag curiously as Lucas sets it down on the table, begins emptying it of its contents. Her eye quickly goes to the bottle in royal purple crushed velvet sleeve, gold embroidery raised and interesting beneath the pads of her fingers. Lucas found Crown Royal completely uninteresting after the fourth or fifth finger but guessing as how she's made no effort to ask for a drink, this is her first time handling alcohol.

 

On the mini-fridge in the corner is a stack of plastic cups, and deeming those appropriate for how badly he wants to get blackout drunk, he takes two from the tower and heads back to the table in front of the window. Lucas leaves the Crown for later and dumps into a cup two large fingers of Jack, finds the sour odor of the booze unfamiliar for all the time he's gone without drinking. Sarah watches it as he downs it without hesitation.

 

"I bet that wasn't your first time doing that, was it," she says meekly while making no effort to sample the liquor. This is her first time even seeing it in the flesh since locating to the cult; the elders never allowed it, so she never inquired as to the specifics of drinking. Lucas shrugs and rises to gather a drink of water to counteract the bitter taste left on his tongue. What he's found over the years is that interspersing his drinks with water kept him from waking up in a pool of his own spit on the floor, any floor, whichever one would hold him for a night.

 

"No, but it's the first in about eleven years so go easy on me if you see me making up for lost time," Lucas mentions in-between sips of the tap water in his cup. That last time, so long ago when it's now put into perspective as to the time he finds himself in now, was Roy's birthday.

 

He'd woken up, taken one look at the calendar, and figured out just how much he could drink himself into without staying broke for the next two weeks between paychecks. The thought of the one person he ever held hope in being miles, maybe even states away from him in a state of misery, during a time they'd both eat an entire sheet cake from the grocery store and try not to fall asleep on the back roads of San Paulo, just drove him to nothingness.

 

For those twenty-four hours he didn't speak to anyone except a mumbled thank you to any cashier he happened to come upon, and slept for half the day after the bottles, the cans had run dry. That he had deemed to be his last entangle with alcohol that wasn't brought on by anything but happiness. He'd seen too much growing up of men drinking themselves six feet under in the face of their women, their children up and leaving them, and he figured out he'd be damned if he'd be another case of that. After all, Roy would come back. They always did.

 

And he did.

 

"We met about that time, me and Roy," Sarah mentions and the third drink now makes it impossible for him to respond to that with anything but a slow sigh. There's no use in raising a stink about it now, he supposes, what with Alton and him sleeping in the other room.

 

Or at least, he hopes Roy's sleeping. "He'd been with us for a while we just…stumbled across each other. It was about two years into us talking and staying close during the sermons that an elder proposed we got married. So, we did." She rubs where perhaps a wedding band might have been in a different time, or perhaps the cult's rendition of a symbol binding her to Roy for hopefully the span of both their lifetimes.

 

"And Alton happened not shortly thereafter, didn't he?"

 

Sarah nods her head once, braid slipping down the slope of her shoulder. "My miracle baby. They hadn't ever thought I would have been able to have children. My mother got lucky with just me and for a while I thought I had gotten that very same luck. That's my only baby in there."

 

She looks past the both of them to the wall separating her from her son and ex-husband. "All I wanted was a baby. Just one. It didn't have to be the entire hoard of children some women in the community had. I couldn't imagine myself herding around all those little people and keeping some bit of sanity. So God took one look at the both of us, and down Alton came."

 

She fumbles around where they had managed to gather a few pieces of luggage and pulls out a well-loved pocketbook. Its back pocket gets pulled open and she pulls out a picture tattered at its corners. Handing it to Lucas he unfolds it to find Roy a little older than he'd left Lucas, a bundle of white blankets in his arms with a little red face poking out of them he'd assume was Alton. Lucas can see in Roy's still face the tracks left behind by tears long since dried. If he thinks hard enough he can feel some semblance of the pride, the happiness a new father has. And it only makes him take a little longer of a sip of his new drink.

 

"Growing up he always loved kids, at least, the littler ones we grew up with," Lucas says after the sip is over. He and Roy were the oldest in their particular neighborhood, one colonized by a group of families whose ancestors had ancestors who had parents make up their neck of the woods in west Texas. Lucas's parents had stopped at him, swearing off children after he seemed to be much too much for them to handle.

 

Roy's had had a gaggle, Roy being the youngest and the others long since having left the family home for bigger and better things. Lucas thinks back to the pride and joy Roy had been for the Tomlin patriarch and matriarch, a cluster of baby pictures in ornate picture frames huddled much too close for comfort for the narrow hearth.

 

"The rest of the children in the community would have been blessed to have had a father like Roy," Sarah says wistfully with what Lucas thinks are tears glinting at the corners of her tired eyes. She takes the picture back when Lucas proffers it to her, and she puts another in his hand in its place.

 

This time it's one of Roy holding a not-too-happy Alton, who seems to have been caught a little upset with the camera close nearby. Sarah exhales a little laugh seeing Alton's scrunched-up face. "Roy had needed to go with a few of the elders around the community for maintenance projects. Alton, as you can see, wasn't having it." Lucas can't help but laugh, too. Roy in the picture looks like he's trying to handle it as best as he can for a young, first-time father.

 

"Alton's lucky to have Roy, we all are," Lucas adds. Before him the bottles get more spread out, plastic litters the tabletop as he opens them all to sample. He regrets having bought anything tasting of daiquiri but at that short point in his life he was looking for anything advising him to not mix it with any other liquids. He looks up at Sarah from the field of bottles and makes sure her eyes are on his before he speaks again. "At one point in my life Roy was mine. And I was his. I don't think I'll ever be that happy again."

 

Sarah instantly looks down once that statement is made then processed. She knew from the second the two of them stood before her in the hallway that at one point in time, there was something more than friendship there. She couldn't remember Roy mentioning anyone from his life before been merged into the community; their time together was admittedly silent once Alton had arrived, maintaining the union for the sake of childrearing, keeping up the picture of blossoming young family even as one snuck in to usurp Roy of the position he treasured above all other, being a father.

 

"I knew it when you were side by side back at the house," she confesses and his face isn't one of surprise at all. Rather, one of anticipation. "He never looked at me like that. Like I was something familiar after being sent off into the abyss. Part of me's always had a feeling like there was something that happened in the past to make him committed to only one, despite all that's happened."

 

A pause and she puts her purse back down on the floor, crosses one of her legs over the other beneath her long skirt. "And I knew it looking at you. You seem like the kind of person that's gone so long being overlooked that you express too much, put too much into your face that you forget that sometimes people are watching you. And I was."

 

He swallows, the air between them slowly growing defiant, as it all seems to be coming to a head rather quickly. "Don't think for a second that I'm not alright with it. I'm not going to sit here in the face of all that's happened and pretend that you were not part of his life. That you still are, that he holds you as high as you can go." He's got a mouthful of Jack percolating when she leans forward to put a sympathetic hand on the hard slope of his knee beneath roughened denim. "And you know I'm right. So you keep on doing what you think is responsible for letting you forget…" She grabs the bottle of Jack by its neck and holds it within one lithe hand. It jostles briefly in her grip and spills a little onto her first. She makes no effort to clean it from her skin. "In the hopes that I won't judge you for it." He hadn't mentioned judgment, hell, even implied it in anything he even said to her. It is in Sarah Lucas has met a match. No one before has sought to dig deep into something he had managed to bury within excuses consisting of false feigns of exhaustion, of lonely nights in his apartment, his trailer when the money got tough, tough from days he couldn't find himself being able to drag his body in to go to work. "I don't. In fact, I appreciate you for it. You are a token of Roy's life, both then and now. In a way you taught him to love."

 

"He taught me," Lucas inhales when a bit of the booze goes down the wrong pipe and he coughs fruitlessly in an effort to clear it. "And don't get preachy on me." Thus begins the mouthy part of his drunken personality, and he tries to fight it off in the sakes that she's not in need to see this part of him.

 

"I watched that goddamned preacher drag him into that truck, Sarah. He was crying so loudly you'd thought someone was carting him off to the gallows. I have a scar on my knee there, from where I'd cut myself trying to run after the minister's truck to try and get him back. I was hurt so badly, so numb from watching him leave, that it took me three fucking days to realize it had gotten infected. Barbed wire's a hell of a weapon, almost as much as that piece of shit father he had." He roughly rolls up his jeans to show her and with her wince he shoves the pants leg back down.

 

A few minutes spent huffing in deep breaths and his eyes start to burn with tears. His face threatens to break under the dam of twenty years of all of this, all he had to go through, all he had to go without. Sarah stands without another word and hurries the cup, the bottles away from him as he slumps forward onto the surface of the table with a heavy sigh weakened by the first sounds of a sob. Sarah leans over him with hands bracketing his shoulders, the slope of his neck.

 

"Oh, God forgive me, I loved him," Lucas gasps into the darkness his lowered head makes as it rests within his folded arms, his own take on solitude in the presence of another. Sarah nods against the top of his buzzed head where she presses her cheek to him. "Hell, what am I talking about, I still love him." He laughs a little past the jag of tears, a broken sound that makes her wince with just how much lies behind it. "Love him with all of me."

 

"I know it," Sarah murmurs to him as she moves back to sit in her respected seat. He sits up now, rubs his face crudely on his jacket sleeve, grimaces when the tears that stain it are more than he had bargained for on this particular night. "He's so loved, Lucas. He'll never have to go a day on this earth without knowing someone loved him."

 

Lucas gives her a watery smile to let her know he's on the mend from the break in his front. He thinks something should lighten this mood, to start fixing the bridge that threatened to crumble between them. "You weren't his first." She furrows her brow, lets a genuinely curious smirk cross her features. "His seventeenth birthday. We had ice cream cake at Dairy Queen and my dad's duelie truck for the night." Sarah openly laughs at this confession, a startling but welcome noise in a room that was all but quiet up until now. She shakes her head playfully and retrieves him a glass of water to soothe his throat, to begin worrying away the alcohol that promised to bring up the worst from a past he was trying to forget.

 

For the rest of the night, they talk until they're sure they'll go hoarse. Lucas learns more than he ever did in the trooper academy, learns all the ins and outs of Roy that culminated as a result of his new life. He laughs more than he ever remembers doing on his lonesome for the last twenty years, and when the morning comes she lets him be the first out of the room to check on Roy and Alton. After all, she knows he's earned it.


End file.
